It has become relatively common for individuals to possess a number of different devices through which they communicate. For example, a person may have a home telephone, a wireless telephone, a pager, a personal digital assistant (PDA), and an office telephone to name a few. As the population becomes increasingly mobile, making contact with a person through one of these communication devices has become more difficult.
In the context of telephony, call forwarding is one method of addressing this problem. Certain telephone systems allow users to enter another number to which a call is forwarded if not answered by a specified number of rings. This should allow an individual with multiple telephone devices to forward the call to such devices until the telephone at which the individual is located finally rings. However, if several telephones are involved, this approach becomes complicated. Moreover, it requires the calling party to remain on the line for a significant period of time if the call is to be forwarded multiple times. Furthermore, it is necessary that call forwarding capabilities exist on each of the individual's telephones. In addition, this approach requires that all telephones involved be reprogrammed each time an individual desires to initiate call forwarding.
At times, a user engaged in an active media session with a remote party may wish to move the session to one of his or her other devices. For example, if the user is participating in a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) session with a remote party using a mobile device, he or she may wish to move the session to an office or home telephone to preserve battery power in the mobile device. In another example, if the user is engaged in a multi-media session with a remote party, such as a video conference, he or she may wish to move the session from a fixed device, like a desktop personal computer, to a mobile device so as to enable the user to move while maintaining the session. One mechanism is to terminate the previous session and re-establish a new session over the new device, but that would be highly disruptive.